Monday, August 12, 2013

I recently re-watched the original 1983 "V" miniseries with my kids. If you don't recall it, the premise is that aliens come to Earth offering peace and prosperity, but their benevolence quickly changes to tyranny, their political opponents start disappearing, and it turns out that they're actually lizards bent on stealing our seawater, enslaving some of us, and eating the rest. The show is filled with unsubtle references to the Third Reich, so probably the dominant interpretation of the show's theme is an unobjectionable but trite "Don't let the Holocaust happen again."

But there's another theme running through the miniseries: the radicalization of the comfortable. The show begins with the following dedication:

To the heroism of the Resistance Fighters — past, present, future — this work is respectfully dedicated.

The show then opens in the middle of El Salvador's civil war, where a local rebel leader is being interviewed about recent losses to government soldiers. During the interview, the rebel looks directly into the camera and promises that he will keep fighting until his people are free, and then asks the audience, "You got that, Mister?" We then see him heroically defy an attacking government helicopter with a handgun.

With this setup, the mission of the show is to get us to identify with that rebel leader. What would it take to get comfortable suburban Americans to take up arms in the same way? Our stand-in is Juliet Parish (Faye Grant), a bright and mousy (if conventionally Hollywood-attractive) medical student living on the L.A. coast with her stockbroker boyfriend. She's perfectly content measuring tumors on laboratory mice and doesn't seem to have a political or violent bone in her body.

Over the course of the four-hour miniseries, though, she and a group of others find themselves marginalized and persecuted by the new alien regime and slowly find each other and take up arms. The group includes a cross-section of 1980s Los Angeles -- a white anthropologist, an African American refinery worker, a Latino gardener, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor -- but it is Julie's transformation that is most central to the story. Ultimately, the new rebels turn to her for organizational leadership, and she finds herself transformed into guerrilla, to the point where she reenacts the opening scene (at which she was not present), shooting defiantly at an alien vessel.

In hindsight, this is a pretty radical message. The show is encouraging us to empathize with armed guerrillas in El Salvador and essentially everywhere else in the world. (This is particularly interesting given that the U.S. was backing the El Salvadoran military at the time.) We're not so different, the show is saying. Under the right circumstances, we all could -- indeed, should -- become rebels. This was a similar tack taken by the "Galactica" reboot during the New Caprica occupation, when the show asked us to sympathize with a subjugated population building IEDs and employing suicide bombers, and they got some pushback for that. "V" was made over 20 years earlier.

Note: I have ignored the main character of Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) above in part because his role is, to me, the least interesting, even if it probably takes up the most screen time. Not that the actor does a bad job -- I like him! -- but the character just doesn't really undergo much of a transformation. He's mainly just used by the script to show us things the other humans don't get to see.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Loyal readers will notice that I haven't posted much on these pages in a while. I'm devoting my blogging energies these days to Mischiefs of Faction and to my weekly gig at Pacific Standard. These commitments seem like more than enough to keep me busy right now. I'm keeping Enik Rising open for business, in case I feel compelled to say something about "Star Wars" or a cake I'm baking, but for now, if you want to catch me, please check the sites above. Oh, and definitely follow me on Twitter. I'm not even close to done with that yet.

Monday, February 18, 2013

What happens to the electorate when you tighten up rules for voting? Does everyone have a harder time voting, or are some groups of voters affected more than others?

We got some evidence on this question in Colorado recently. For several election cycles, Colorado has provided mail-in ballots automatically to those who have registered as requesting mail-in ballots in previous cycles. In late 2011, Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced that the state's mail-in ballots would henceforth only be sent out automatically to those who were "active" voters, meaning they had voted in the last general election. This led to a dispute between Gessler's office and the counties of Denver and Pueblo, with the Brennan Center and Colorado Common Cause getting involved. I was brought in as an expert witness to help determine the effect that the change would have on the electorate, specifically with regards to race.

With the help of University of Denver geographer Paul Sutton, I compared voting precincts in Denver, Pueblo, and throughout the state based on their racial breakdowns and on the percent of voters listed as IFTV ("Inactive - failed to vote," meaning they did not vote in the last general election). Below is a scatterplot showing the percent of residents who are Latino compared to the percent who are IFTV status, by precinct within Denver:

That's a very strong relationship, suggesting that the rule change would have a disproportionate impact on Latinos, making it less likely that they'll receive a mail-in ballot. Basically the same trend was found among African American residents:

I found these same patterns within Pueblo County and across the state as a whole.

Sutton then made these maps for Denver County, showing roughly the same trends geographically (click to expand):

Again, the trend is quite consistent: the higher concentration of a racial minority group within a precinct, the more people in that precinct who did not vote in the previous general election, and the more people who would be deprived of an automatic mail-in ballot.

Now, there is an ecological inference issue here: I'm making individual-level interpretations using precinct-level data. To try to get around this, I employed the ecological inference program Eco to make some approximations of the individual-level behavior. The results estimated that roughly 10 percent of eligible white voters were IFTV status, but roughly a third of Latinos and African Americans were IFTV status. The change in the rule on mail-in ballots would have meant racial minorities having a harder time voting by mail than whites.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Dan Drezner makes some nice points in response to the Forbes article that lists academia as one of the least stressful occupations. While he rightly notes that adjuncts face a great deal of career stress, he concedes that those of us in tenure or tenure-track positions enjoy a degree of autonomy and flexibility that those in careers at similar pay levels do not have.

He also makes a point about us self-selecting into this line of work, and I think this is an important one in the discussion of stress. Academics generally do their jobs because it's a career they actively sought out and they study a subject that deeply interests them. (No one ever wrote a folk song about being forced to become an academic because it was the only job in town.) Thus, we end up committing to a lot of things we don't actually have to do -- such as conference papers, journal reviews, academic blogs, etc. -- because we find them intrinsically interesting or we believe we have a decent contribution to make. Now, it's good for the discipline and for our own career reputations and professional advancement that we do these things, but they're not always mandatory, particularly for tenured faculty. So the professional commitments I took on during that blessed year between gaining tenure and becoming department chair certainly added to my stress levels, but a) I could have declined many/most of them and kept my job, b) the commitments brought some satisfaction that partially offset the stresses, and c) the stresses weren't remotely like those faced by firefighters, police officers, soldiers, miners, commercial fishermen, etc. That is, no MPSA paper is going to kill me, although some have tried.

Similarly, with teaching, many of us endeavor to improve our teaching or offer new courses because we believe it's important to do so. Taking on such a commitment invariably generates new stresses -- teaching a new course sometimes leads to initially lower course evaluations, generating a new course is harder than repeating an old one -- and we could usually just not do these things and still keep our jobs. Nonetheless, we take on the task of improving our course offerings, and the concomitant stress, because to quote Hyman Roth, "this is the work we have chosen," and we think this is the best way to do it.